4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Actually, biff *does not* notify you of anything. It merely sets the X bit on your tty, which then tells comsat that it's allowed to notify you when sendmail notifies it that you have new mail. (xbiff, on the other hand, does notify you and polls your mailbox to do so.) Incidentally, COMSAT was the name of the mail daemon under ITS -- not sure if Eric intended to make that reference.